Motivated by the current (2011) political climate in Wisconsin it seems reasonable to devote some time and effort to comment on issues and some of the hyperbole. So we in the public should do what we can to help focus "journalists" on delineating real facts versus spin. If you accept the spin you do not understand the policy implications.

...The documents come from a failed bid by Wisconsin prosecutors to hold Walker to account. That case went all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court before the slim majority of Republican judges on the bench dismissed the case and ordered all documents permanently destroyed. As the documents -- published today in the Guardian -- show, some of those same judges relied on the money laundry that Walker used to get and keep his office to campaign for their own elections.

What's more, the documents reveal that the dark money that Walker raised translated into a tit-for-tat in the form of legislative and executive favors from the Wisconsin government -- for example, NL Industries nearly escaped all punishment for the lead poisoning it induced in the people who lived and worked near its factory, thanks to a law that retroactively immunized them from liability for polluting (NL was only held to account when a court ruled that retroactive immunity was unconstitutional). Harold Simmons, owner of NL Industries, wrote three checks of undisclosed amounts to the Wisconsin Club for Growth -- checks that Scott Walker solicited.

The trove is fascinating, and documented in eye-watering detail by the Guardian's team in a tremendous, deep interactive piece. There's lots of juicy notes, like the fact that Donald Trump gave big when asked by Scott Walker.

... From the Guardian (?!)

Among the leaked John Doe files that the Wisconsin supreme court ordered to be suppressed are documents that underline how anxious Walker's circle were about the threat, as they saw it, to the court's conservative majority. In an email dated 14 December 2010, WCfG's director Eric O'Keefe says he's been in touch with Diane Hendricks, the owner of a roofing company who Forbes describes as America's richest self-made woman with a personal fortune of $5bn. Hendricks is a well-known funder of rightwing causes and individuals, among them Scott Walker himself who she was to go on to support with $500,000 in 2012 for his own recall election.

Donald Trump gave a big education policy speech Thursday afternoon, choosing to deliver it at an appropriate location: a poorly performing charter school with a lot of lobbying money in its background. Trump offered up the usual Republican privatization wish list of vouchers, charter schools, and online charter schools bleeding money from public schools, with the centerpiece being to take all of the federal money currently allocated to schools and districts with the most low-income students and allow it to bleed out to charter and private schools. As education reporter Dana Goldstein tweeted, “I could write something about Trump's ‘plan’ but all there is to say is that it's warmed over early '00s stuff.”

Trump touted merit pay for teachers, which research shows does not improve educational outcomes. He called for vouchers, which haven’t done especially well by students in Milwaukee or Louisiana or, for that matter, Ohio:

Ohio has a state program that supplies taxpayer-funded vouchers to more than 18,000 students. A recent study of that program, released in July by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found that students who used the vouchers to attend private schools actually performed worse on standardized tests than similar students who stayed in public schools